The Western Hemisphere

The aggressive wartime strategy of the United States, concerted with
its European Allies, into which it launched so promptly and with such a
massive deployment of force after 7 December 1941, obscures the fact that
its declared military policy before that date was defensive. In November
1938 President Roosevelt enunciated the doctrine that defense of the continental
United States required, as the military objective of the nation, defense
of the Western Hemisphere. This fixed the official goal for the efforts
of the War Department until Pearl Harbor, and, in the view of the authors
of these volumes, dominated its plans and preparations during the two years
preceding the Destroyer-Base Agreement of September 1940. Even after that
the requirements of hemisphere defense defined the framework within which
the Army and its Air Forces put into effect the limited preparations and
actions that were directed against the aggressions of Nazi Germany and
Japanese imperialism. The area covered in these two volumes is vast and
so are the topics.